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I would love to know more about this trend. It fascinates me that we have settled on something that is so widely hated. It seems correlated with the decline i
by mulmen 4y ago
I would love to know more about this trend. It fascinates me that we have settled on something that is so widely hated.
It seems correlated with the decline in UI design. 30 years ago we had ideas of how people interact with computers which we had built up over decades. What appear to be dated UIs like Windows 3.1 or even XP actually had a lot of thought and care put into them, with sound reasoning. The modern take seems fixated on minor details without any holistic vision or even reason.
How did we get so bad at decision making? It seems like we stopped valuing insight in favor of data. But without insight we just chase the data we have.
- sokoloff 4y agoSomething which is hated by the not-decision-makers but costs 25-40% as much of a big number will be overwhelmingly chosen by the are-decision-makers.
- mulmen 4y agoYeah, this reinforces another perception I have. Which is that we have lost any concept of opportunity cost. We might save on commercial real estate but what is the cost in productivity, innovation, and ultimately profit?
- JPws_Prntr_Fngr 4y agoOpportunity cost is a concept from microeconomics, a field completely alien to the vast majority of the managerial strata, in my experience; any lingering principles from microecon 101 having been long since replaced by MBA dogma.
- piva00 4y agoThose metrics demand a much deeper and proper investigation of data to materialise into a quantifiable way for management, management is pretty blind to anything that isn't easy-to-crunch numbers. Probably due to education in most MBA curricula. Everyone who has worked in an open plan office knows the pains, the constant interruptions, not only from chatter or shoulder taps but the incessant movement of people around, the alertness of being aware of people behind you, so on and so forth, but those are not easily quantifiable. Much like UX, to build a case for something that empirically most of us know is better takes a lot more effort than some bean counters/MBAs pointing to a number in a spreadsheet.
- mulmen 4y agoThose “metrics” require good instincts. The kind that justify the eye-watering compensation packages that upper management demand. I’m a data engineer but even I think we worship data instead of understanding it as part of a larger decision making process.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> It fascinates me that we have settled on something that is so widely hated. It's not obvious that it is widely hated. You can find people who hate it. But that's true of everything.
- mulmen 4y agoI don’t know anyone who likes it. Where are the people who love open offices? They probably exist but I have never met one.
- rightbyte 4y agoThey exist. They want to feel the pulse. The same persons that like bars where you have to scream to have a conversation I guess.
- red-iron-pine 4y agoNobody likes that either, at least not sober. But that's where the music is, the people are, the dancing is. source: bartended in a VIP space in a casino while doing fiber splicing on the side. the number of people who bought into the VIP "because it's not as loud" was very high; I heard some permutation of "it's nicer in here, quieter, I can actually talk to people" every shift.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoYou don't think you might be seeing some selection bias in your sample of "people who paid to be somewhere quieter"?
- mulmen 4y agoI like socializing in bars with people and I like doing work in quiet isolation. I also sleep in a bedroom but cook in a kitchen. There’s nothing inconsistent about that. Different settings are appropriate for different things.
- snapcaster 4y ago